It’s bad news for the $144 million comedy, which needs to do well globally to make back its hefty budget. Though “Ghostbusters” hasn’t officially been screened for Chinese officials, its subject matter will likely run afoul of the country’s censors, according to an insider. The state-controlled film board does not approve of films that promote cults or superstitious beliefs. In the past, movies that focus on the paranormal, such as last fall’s “Crimson Peak,” have been unable to secure a berth in the country.

To try to assuage censors, Sony has cooked up a new title for “Ghostbusters” — it’s now known as “Super Power Dare-to-Die Team.” China continues to be a critical source of revenues for major Hollywood blockbusters. […] [Source]

Many guessed that Sony made the adjustment in hopes of finessing the film into China’s strictly regulative but increasingly lucrative theatrical market.

But sources close to China Film Co., the dominant state-owned film body that handles the import and release of all foreign movies in the country, tell THR that censorship wasn’t the determinative issue.

“It’s been confirmed that Ghostbusters won’t be coming to China, because they think it’s not really that attractive to Chinese audiences,” says one Chinese executive. “Most of the Chinese audience didn’t see the first and second movies, so they don’t think there’s much market for it here.”

Sony isn’t commenting, but a Hollywood source with knowledge of the situation says the film hasn’t been officially submitted for approval by Chinese regulators. [Source]

Under China’s censorship laws any films suggesting the existence of the supernatural can be banned from distribution. Exceptions are made for ghost stories based on Chinese mythology or films in which the supernatural is explained by a realistic rationale (eg drug use or dream sequence). Among the films that have fallen foul of the ruling in the past is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro’s gothic horror starring Tom Hiddleston.

China runs a quota on the number of American films allowed into the country, yet Chinese audiences have often offered a lifeline for US productions that struggled at home. Warcraft, Duncan Jones’s adaptation of the popular video game, bombed in the US, but dominated the Chinese box office chart last month. Known locally as “World of Magic Beasts”, it made more than half of its $430.1 m revenue in China.

Feig’s comedy is expected to face a tough time at the US box office this week, with analysts expecting it to take a maximum of $50m (from a reported $144m budget) in its opening weekend. The film, which has received generally good reviews, has been hit by a wave of criticism from those who are annoyed at the idea of female Ghostbusters. [Source]

After the awards last Sunday, a number of local film producers spoke out against Ten Yearswinning best film, most notably by Peter Lam, chairman of Hong Kong filmmaking powerhouse Media Asia and founding chairman of the Hong Kong Chamber of Films. Lam said the awards was hijacked by politics.

Other prominent members of the Chamber of Films have indicated that a proposal would be made to the Hong Kong Film Awards Association Board of Directors to change the voting mechanism of the awards.

“I think the voting system of the Hong Kong Film Awards has room for improvement, especially in the second round of voting, it can be easily manipulated to produce an irrational result,” said Daniel Lam, Chamber of Films member and owner of Universe Films, whose Little Big Master was one of the nominated films for best film.

Daniel Lam added: “We at the Chamber of Films will call for a meeting as soon as possible, and hope the Hong Kong Film Awards will amend its voting system. If there were nothing wrong with the voting system, how would Ten Years be crowned as the best film? We hope the Hong Kong Film Awards will listen to our comments, otherwise it’s meaningless for us to participate in the awards.” [Source]

The directors of the Ten Years, which won Best Film on Sunday, said on Tuesday that the movie was a project to encourage Hong Kong people to start thinking about the future of the city. Having created the platform for discussions on this matter is more important than the prize, they said.

“If a movie deliberately tries to avoid talking about politics, that in itself is a political movie,” said Ng Ka-leung, one of the movie’s five directors.

[…] Shu Kei, a filmmaker and chairman of the school of film and television at Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, said Ten Years won the top honour through a “democratic” process because the prize was not awarded by the organiser of the awards.

“It was chosen after two rounds of elections by open ballot, a responsible way of election,” he wrote on his Facebook.

Shu made the remarks after Peter Lam Kin-ngok, chairman of production company Media Asia, said immediately after Sunday’s ceremony that “politics has kidnapped the profession and politicised film awards”. [Source]

Thousands of curious Chinese citizens have been downloading American romantic comedy Ten Years in the hope of viewing the controversial 2015 Hong Kong thriller of the same name. The 2011 box office flop was the second most downloaded file on the YYeTs website, a popular portal in the mainland for illegal downloads of American and European films. It came days after the Hong Kong socio-political fantasy, also entitled Ten Years, won the award for Best Film at the 35th Hong Kong Film Awards.

Ten Years is a dark socio-political fantasy that imagines how Hong Kong may look like in the year 2025. Five directors produced five shorts exploring a city where shops are attacked by uniformed army cadets for selling banned materials, where Mandarin is the dominant language, and where an activist self-immolates in a fight for the city’s independence.

[…] Chinese netizens expressed their disappointment on the download site: “I thought this was the 35th Hong Kong Film Awards Best Film winner ‘Ten Years,’” said one commenter.

[…] “HK at least has the separation of the three powers, at least they can decide on what films they want to watch, at least their kids won’t be made to become brainwashed products of some political party,” another commenter said. [Source]

]]>192912Minitrue: SAPPRFT Directives on Sensitive Contenthttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/04/minitrue-sapprft-directives-sensitive-content/
Mon, 04 Apr 2016 19:33:07 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=192834The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online.

Today at a regular meeting of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, the following propaganda directives were released. Please take note:

The web drama “Addicted,” dealing with homosexual subject matter, has been forbidden from broadcast. All channels are to cease inviting lead actors onto their shows or to hype them, such as Huang Jingyu, Xu Weizhou, Lin Fengsong, and Chen Wen.

Do not hype the South Korean series “Descendants of the Sun.” Do not praise it too highly. Water down commercial antics designed to hook viewers. Ensure comments are appropriate. (Director: Lee Eung-bok. Lead actors: Kim Eun-sook, Song Joong-ki, Song Hye-kyo, Jin Goo, Kim Ji-won.)

Do not hype the Hong Kong independence film “Ten Years.” The film has been nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award, and the award ceremony will be held in Hong Kong on April 3. At that time, all television, website, and broadcast channels are not to live broadcast the award ceremonies, and must resolutely prevent the appearance of related video. (Director: Kwok Zune, Huang Feipeng, Jevons Au, Kwun-wai Chow, Ng, Ka-Leung. Lead actors: Liu Kai-chi, Leung Kin Ping, Catherine Chau, Neo Yau Hawk-Sau, Ng Siu Hin.)

Do not hype the luxurious weddings of certain celebrities. Recently, some websites promoted the lavish weddings of Huang Xiaoming and Nicky Wu, breaching our traditional virtues of diligence and thrift. Do not obsess over this sensational news. (April 2, 2016) [Chinese]

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source. See CDT’s collection of Directives from the Ministry of Truth since 2011.

]]>192834Oscar Streams Canceled as Online Video Rules Tightenhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/02/china-cheers-dicaprios-oscar-win-though-online-broadcasts-halted/
Tue, 01 Mar 2016 03:31:56 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=191876At The Hollywood Reporter, Patrick Brzeski reports that Chinese online streaming site iQiyi cancelled a planned live bilingual broadcast of this year’s Oscars ahead of Sunday’s event, removing one of the main viewing options available to Chinese audiences tuning in to the 88th Academy Awards.

On the eve of Oscars night in China, local streaming video service iQiyi abruptly suspended plans to broadcast the awards live online across the country.

A spokesperson for iQiyi confirmed the cancelation to The Hollywood Reporter, but declined to comment. Reports of the sudden change of plans began spreading Sunday night across Chinese social media. As of last week, the company had been expected to air a bilingual live broadcast of the 88th Academy Awards. A cursory search of the iQiyi site shows no sign of live Oscars coverage.

Meanwhile, a live online broadcast of the Oscars by 1905.com, the online video platform of state broadcaster CCTV’s movie channel, has gone forward. [Source]

[…] Douyu TV, another video streaming site, also cancelled its plans for a live broadcast.

That left Chinese film aficionados with few options. A state-run online movie portal called m1905.com streamed the awards show Monday, but with a roughly 15-minute delay. When China Real Time watched the online broadcast, the screen frequently broke away from the live broadcast of the show and instead ran trailers of the nominated films, along with a message stating that it had lost the signal from the awards ceremony venue. The site live-streamed last year’s ceremony exclusively in mainland China.

It isn’t clear why the show’s streaming channels were limited. A person close to the websites said the cancellations were the result of the companies’ “consideration of policy risks,” without elaborating. [Source]

Speculation on Sina Weibo attributed the cancellation of the broadcast to the nomination of two films, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight forFreedom and Racing Extinction. Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight forFreedom is one of this year’s nominees for Best Documentary Feature. The film depicts the Ukrainian revolution from the perspectives of diverse groups of people, according to the Website of the awards’ presenter, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. [Source]

On Twitter, William Farris tweeted that the Chinese name of the documentary film Winter on Fire is now blocked on Sina Weibo and Baidu.

Addiction, an online drama depicting gay love – a taboo subject for state media entertainment programmes – was taken offline last week just days after other programmes, including Go Princess Go, were stopped because of excessive sex, violence and controversial content.

[…] Li Jingsheng, head of the television drama management division of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, said in a keynote speech at yesterday’s annual meeting of the National Television Industry Annual Conference that the watchdog would step up regulation of shows produced and broadcast on the internet, the web portal Sina.com reported.

[…] The watchdog would come up with regulations, including one to ensure the censor’s standards for television programmes matched those of online programmes, Li said. “What cannot be aired on television must not be shown on the internet.” Li added.

Censors hired by video websites will need to be trained and tested by the watchdog, with censoring carried out 24 hours a day. [Source]

China’s online video streaming industry is highly fragmented, with five major players and numerous other competitors locked in a desperate scramble for viewer attention.

Much like their counterparts in the West such as Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, Chinese video sites like Le.com (formerly known as letv.com) and iqiyi.com, have been directing more of their resources toward original programming, often with a more risqué flavor than what is found on traditional TV.

Some Chinese web dramas have made the leap from online to the silver screen as local studios bet that their built-in fan base will translate into box office success.

[…] Online dramas and comedies are also a reliable proving ground for acting talent, with many up and coming stars first cutting their teeth online before making the leap to film.

Lu Zhengyu, a post-80s actor and director who made his name directing and starring in the offbeat online comedy on Youku Tudou, starred in his protégé Stephen Chow’s The Mermaid. [Source]

]]>191876Minitrue: Suspend Broadcast of HK, Taiwan Film Awardshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/02/minitrue-broadcast-of-hk-taiwan-film-awards-suspended/
Mon, 22 Feb 2016 20:33:44 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=191609The following censorship instructions, issued to the media by government authorities, have been leaked and distributed online. The name of the issuing body has been omitted to protect the source.

Due to social changes in Hong Kong and Taiwan this year, and to prevent the negative influence of speech, film, and television which do not conform to the national condition, all major websites and mobile apps must suspend live and relay broadcasts of the Hong Kong Film Awards in April and of Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards at the end of the year. Major media may continue to report on the Hong Kong and Taiwan awards. (February 21, 2016) [Chinese]

Produced on a budget of about $75,000, Ten Years became a phenomenon in Hong Kong after its release on Dec. 17. Initially shown on just one screen at the city’s leading independent cinema, Broadway Cinematheque, the film attracted a wave of media attention when its sold-out showings beat the local per-screen average of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which debuted on Dec. 18. Two additional cinemas began showing the film, and it eventually grossed just shy of $1 million.

Local reviewers have praised the film. The South China Morning Post called it “a reminder of the power of independent, intelligent filmmaking as a vehicle for social and political critique” and “one of the most thought-provoking local films in years.”

State-controlled media outlets in mainland China, however, have heaped scorn on the picture. Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times called the movie “absurd,” “pessimistic” and a “virus of the mind.” [Source]

According to Heather Timmons at Quartz, movie-goers “left packed screenings in tears” after viewing scenes of 21st-century Red Guards, stifling of Cantonese, and self-immolation. But despite its resonance with Hongkongers, “Ten Years” has now been pulled from theaters:

But after just two months, the film is no longer screening anywhere in Hong Kong. Some theater owners say the move (link in Chinese) has nothing to do with self-censorship, but it seems hard to justify for economic reasons.

[…] Although Ten Years may no longer be watchable in Hong Kong, it may be shown overseas soon.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

]]>191609Censors Gave Carte Blanche, Says ‘Wolf Totem’ Directorhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/02/censors-gave-carte-blanche-says-wolf-totem-director/
Mon, 02 Feb 2015 20:18:02 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=180982The French director of Wolf Totem, an adaptation of Lu Jiamin’s 2004 novel, says that Chinese censors granted him “carte blanche” on the project, though he acknowledged that this “may have been an exception.” From Michael Martina at Reuters:

An environmental cautionary tale that pits a pack of wolves against an influx of settlers to the grasslands during the late 1960’s Cultural Revolution, the 2004 bestselling novel also includes critiques of Chinese culture and governance, and favorable allusions to democracy.

[…] “What I can say is that I had carte blanche at every level until this day. The movie you see is the same movie I cut,” Annaud told Reuters in an interview in Beijing ahead of the film’s release in China later this month.

The book won the first Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007. The author, Lu, a retired professor, has since affirmed he had been jailed for his involvement in the 1989 democracy protests around Tiananmen Square.

[…] Much like the book, Annaud’s approximately $40 million movie, backed by the state-run China Film Group, deals with conservation themes head on, though it largely avoids the book’s more subtle political issues. [Source]

[…] Hollywood’s biggest worry about freedom of expression is not North Korea, or terrorist groups, or those who make anonymous threats to movie theaters. And celebrating our “freedom” over North Korea, an impoverished state of 25 million, is both sad and laughable.

The far bigger worry is self-censorship — and there’s no bigger threat here than China. The Chinese don’t hate us because they are like us, or because they are not. In fact, they don’t hate us at all. Beijing poses a major censorship threat because the ruling Chinese Communist Party is keenly sensitive to criticism and has the economic muscle to punish those in Hollywood who make films that displease it.

In other words, the bizarre series of events that caused The Interview to be briefly censored are a distraction from China, Hollywood’s biggest censorship problem.

[…] Consider what would have happened if Rogen and Franco had pitched a movie about two bumbling journalists contracted by the CIA to assassinate Chinese President Xi Jinping — another authoritarian leader who is the commander of a massive army, sits atop a massive nuclear arsenal, and poses a strategic threat to the United States.

[…] No major studio today would dare greenlight a film that would be that offensive to the Chinese Communist Party: the financial costs could be immense. A film studio that was even known to have publicly floated an idea such as this could expect to be effectively blacklisted from working with Beijing — and China is where Hollywood studios will make an increasingly large percentage of their money in coming years. […] [Source]

There are some new last-minute developments regarding censorship, and we have to take time to make some adjustments, so the premiere will be postponed, the company said in a statement on its WeChat social media page.

Jiang, one of China’s most talented actors and writers, is no stranger to censorship headaches. The one-time bad boy of Chinese cinema, he was banned for seven years from filmmaking after Devils on the Doorstep back in 2000.

[…] A sequel to the wildly successful Let the Bullets Fly in 2010, has currently run up more than $19.5 million in preordered tickets, weeks before its theatrical release. [Source]

The Cannes Grand Prix-winning Devils on the Doorstep landed Jiang in trouble for its portrayal of relations between Chinese villagers and Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. State media regulator SARFT objected that these were not sufficiently black and white, lacking the required pure hatred on the Chinese side and unalloyed cruelty by the Japanese. Such issues came to a head in a vulgar and boring; scene in which a donkey belonging to the villagers became aroused by one belonging to the Japanese army.

Set in the chaotic years after the collapse of imperial rule, Let the Bullets Fly tells the story of a Robin Hood-like bandit who kidnaps a con man about to take up the mayorship he secured through bribes. The bandit swaps identities with his hostage and becomes mayor, only to find himself locked in a battle of wits against a corrupt businessman who made his fortune from tobacco and human trafficking.

Movie critics, however, say there is more than meets the eye. Are the con man and businessman symbols of corrupt Chinese officials who have secretly pocketed the fruits of the country’s capitalist-style economic reforms? Is the bandit, who is played by Jiang himself, the brave crusader who dares take on the status quo?

[…] Asked if his latest work was in fact a political criticism, the 48-year-old filmmaker said, “Whatever interpretation is fine. Whatever. You are welcome to think whatever you want to.”[Source]

]]>179728Paul Pickowicz on a Century of Chinese Filmhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/08/cdt-bookshelf-paul-pickowicz-century-chinese-film/
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 19:40:01 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=176336Distinguished Professor of History and Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego Paul G. Pickowicz draws on decades of research in China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation and Controversy (Rowman & Littlefield 2013). The 376-page study moves chronologically as each chapter explores Chinese films, filmmakers and filmmaking from Shanghai in the 1920s to underground films of today. I spoke with Pickowicz about his experience studying Chinese cinema since the 1980s, mainland films that made an impact during key political upheavals, as well as his own thoughts on some of the most underrated and overrated films to come out of Mainland China during the past one hundred years.

China Digital Times: You spent 1982-83 as a “mostly unwelcome” guest at the China Film Archive. What made you feel unwelcome at that time? What was the experience of doing archival research like then and how has that experience changed over the last three decades? Have you felt more welcomed over time?

Paul G. Pickowicz: I felt mostly unwelcome in 1982 because there were people at the archive, and all academic units for that matter, who didn’t want foreigners doing serious and critical humanities research on China. The Cultural Revolution had only recently ended and China was like today’s North Korea in various respects. Many people in authority in academic units simply assumed foreigners were spies and they didn’t want their political careers jeopardized by appearing soft. I asked for but was not given some office space and my comings and goings were tightly scheduled and monitored by official minders. I asked for and was denied access to the archive’s catalog of film holdings and I was not allowed open access to the archive’s holdings of film-related journals and printed material from the pre-1949 period. Each time I wanted something I had to ask whether they had a certain film and whether they had print materials related to the film. It’s not that they didn’t help at all, but rather that every step forward felt like a struggle. My request to spend a year doing research at the archive was granted because I was part of an official US-China exchange program coordinated on the US side by the National Academy of Sciences. In short, if China wanted to send scientists to the US, then the Chinese side had to receive more American scholars interested in humanities research on modern and contemporary China. But I want to emphasize that quietly and behind the scenes there were people at the archive, at the Film Bureau, and at the Ministry of Culture who understood what I was trying to accomplish and did many, many things to help me. What was I trying to accomplish? Let the academic world know the details of the brilliance of pre-1949 Chinese filmmaking. Our ignorance of China’s film history was shocking. The issue was “open” versus “closed.” The closed people were always suspicious and wanted me to officially request anything I wanted to do, including interviews of retired, elderly film personalities, while the open people said there was no reason I couldn’t live with a Chinese family (a taboo at the time), buy a motorcycle to facilitate transportation, and track down famous film personalities on my own and interview them without official minders present.

Working relations with the archive continued over the years, especially when the political situation opened up a bit in the mid- and late-1980s. Of course, behind the scenes friends continued to be very helpful, but even officials began to understand that a professional relationship could be beneficial to both sides. For instance, throughout the 1980s the archive had no convenient way to acquire VHS tapes of classic and current American films. They asked me if I would help. I suggested we do it on a one to one basis without any money changing hands. They would send me a list of 20 tapes they wanted and I would send them a list of 20 pre-1949 films I wanted from them. On my subsequent trips to China we made a number of such exchanges of tapes. We did this several times and it’s the reason I now have such a strong personal collection of rare Chinese films. The archive has also been helpful over the years by providing me with still photos for my articles and books. As recently as fall 2011 the archive invited me to deliver a series of lectures to its MA students and I continue to be in touch with some of the students. Of course there are still taboos, especially research on Shanghai filmmaking in 1937-45 during the Japanese occupation of the city, and officials – – even open-minded ones — still have to worry about being perceived as excessively cooperative.

CDT:What was on the minds of the soon-to-be famous Beijing Film Institute graduates you befriended at that time?

PGP: The Fifth Generation young people I met in 1982 had only recently graduated from the Institute. Many were in the process of discovering and refining their own sense of self — especially their sense of self in relation to officially-defined collectives. It’s impossible to generalize about the whole group because their backgrounds and personalities were so different. Relatively few of them became famous following graduation. The 1978 entrance exams were supposed to be based on talent and objective criteria, but the fact is that many in the fall 1978 entering class were extremely well connected to the pre-Cultural Revolution film world: Bai Yang’s daughter, Zhao Dan’s son, Chen Huaikai’s son, and so forth. Some were highly creative and dying to head out in new directions. Many others manifested ordinary professional competence, but got secure, though routine, jobs in desirable cities and film studios thanks to family influence. But virtually all of them had a strong desire to learn more about foreign culture, including film culture. For both personal and professional reasons, many wanted to connect to the outside world, especially the US, Japan and Europe. Ai Weiwei, a very well-connected young man, dropped out of the institute after only two years to pursue rare opportunities in New York. Young film artists were vividly aware of the profound cultural isolation of China and themselves. Some were genuinely interested in my thinking on a range of topics, while others saw me primarily as a potentially useful foreign “contact.” Some expressed surprisingly unorthodox political and social views; some were very cautious and risk-averse.

CDT: When discussing the institution of marriage in films set in Shanghai in the 1920s, you emphasize the idea that filmmakers were tying modern love and marriage to economic and class realities. Has this same notion permeated depictions of marriage throughout twentieth-century Chinese cinema?

PGP: The themes of love, marriage, and family dominated Chinese filmmaking from the 1920s and continue to have a major impact today. It’s true that in the 1920s many films grappled with the question of the “modern” marriage. Young, urban, middle class people wanted modern love, marriage, and families, but no one knew exactly what modernity meant in these spheres of life. Many of the films described the trial and error experiments of young people who were struggling to establish coherent boundaries. After the revolution in 1949, state sector filmmakers promoted modern “socialist” love, marriage and family life. In the post-Mao period there was a renewed interest in individual desire when it came to love, marriage, and family. In all of these phases, global models of various sorts were being considered and emulated. And during each phase, economic and class realities were important factors.

We also need to keep in mind that Chinese film narratives of the past and present were not necessarily looking at love, marriage, and family as ends in themselves. Quite often the themes of love, marriage, and family functioned as national allegories. These films seem to be talking about a family, but the “family” is standing in for the “nation.” The family functions as a mini-nation, and serious problems related to power hierarchies, class relations, economics, and gender relations within the family are supposed to be read as problems that are nagging the entire nation. In this sense Chinese films, even light-weight entertainment ones, can be politically charged.

CDT: In the 1960s, you explain that filmmakers were given more artistic freedom under the direction of Vice Minister of Culture Xia Yan but were still limited in their ability to criticize the starvation that plagued China during the Great Leap Forward. You conclude saying: “Almost none of these films is a great work of art, but together they served to ease the pain of living in China in the hungry days of the early 1960s.” Which of these films, if any, did qualify as a great work of art?

PGP: Let’s face it. “Greatness” is a highly subjective concept. “Greatness” is relative and depends on one’s definition of greatness. Greatness is also very contextual. Certainly if you look at the films of the early 1960s and compare them to the films produced during the catastrophic Great Leap Forward that came before and the films of the horrific Cultural Revolution that came later, the films of the 1960s stand out. This doesn’t mean that films made during the Maoist mass mobilization campaigns of the late 1950s and late 1960s are not interesting. As visual sources, they can tell us a lot about those tumultuous and gut wrenching periods, but many of the films of the early 1960s have more traction and have ongoing appeals that are more universalistic. Xia Yan was a hopeless Party bureaucrat, but he was also an anti-Maoist who deeply resented the way in which the state run film industry was hijacked by the Great Leap Forward. He was all for party/state control of the film industry and was adamantly opposed to private sector production, but in his anti-Maoist imagination it should be a state controlled industry that maintains its links to the work he and his friends did in the Shanghai film industry of the 1930s. Xia Yan continued to hold on to the view that art making and party-directed socialism were not incompatible. It is in this sense that such films as Third Sister Liu (Liu Sanjie, 1962), Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng, 1962), Early Spring (Zao chun eryue, 1963), Li Shuangshuang (Li Shuangshuang, 1962), and Fat Li, Young Li, and Old Li (Da Li, Xiao Li he Lao Li, 1962) still feel charming and engaging. They are not “great” films, but let’s not forget that Hollywood produced mountains of junk then and produces mountains of junk now. “Great” films are few and far between. Xia Yan’s imagination was quite limited. When the Cultural Revolution ended, his sole concern was getting “his” type of state sector movie making up and running again. He was not among those who believed there should be space for independent, non-state filmmaking in the brave new world of post-Mao China.

CDT: Huang Jianxin, a “politically daring” director of the 1980s addressed contemporary urban problems in works which you say anticipated the “extraordinary turmoil” of the Tiananmen Incident. Transmigration, a film which you describe as exploring “directionless urban youth” marked the first time the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television opened up to journalists to discuss a film since 1949. Why did the Ministry open its doors to journalists interested in discussing this particular film, especially if the film blamed China rather than foreign influences for spiritual pollution?

PGP: Huang Jianxin played a very interesting role in the 1980s run up to June 4, 1989. Unlike Xie Jin, he rejected the highly cathartic though excessively sentimental melodramatic mode of filmmaking and he rejected the tendency the best know Fifth Generation filmmakers, including Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, to set their narratives in the pre-revolution past. Everyone still worked for the party/state, so the political edginess of Huang’s films must be seen in that context. Black Canon Incident (Hei pao shijian, 1986) was a stunning and bitterly satirical critique of mindless and numbing party/state bureaucracy, the same issue that young people in colleges were talking about with greater frequency in the 1980s. Dislocation (Cuowei, 1987) offered a profoundly dystopian view of the direction of Chinese society. Transmigration (Lunhui, 1989), which I watched with Huang at a pre-release screening in Beijing in late 1988, tackled head on the hot button issue of restless urban youth struggling to find their individual identities in the post-Mao era. I think I was the first person to apply the term “postsocialist” to films, especially Huang Jianxin’s, that came out in the years leading up to June 4. Huang was all for reform, but his work reminded people that the legacies of the Mao eras continued to haunt the post-Mao era, that many aspects of Chinese life had not been reformed, and that many young people were “lost.”

The reason that some bureaucrats in the state sector allowed Huang’s provocative films to be made and encouraged open discussion of them is that there were deep divisions at all levels of the party/state in the 1980s. There were cultural bureaucrats who despised the sort of work done by Huang Jianxin, Xie Jin, and Zhang Yimou, but there were many others who thought all these types of filmmaking were healthy and addressed real problems that couldn’t be ignored. There were people in the bureaucracy who wanted more openness, more diversity of production, and more expressions of cultural confidence in dealing with problems openly.

CDT: Has Huang Jianxin received recognition for addressing social problems of the 1980s in the Chinese film community today? How did Transmigration connect with the sentiments of the youth at the time? Does the film resonate with party corruption and youth in China today?

PGP: The trilogy of complex films made by Huang Jianxin in the 1980s does indeed address issues of corruption, bureaucracy, anomie, and restlessness that are endemic in China today. But his old films, like the old films of Xie Jin and Zhang Yimou, are not widely viewed today. Scholars in China give these filmmakers a lot of credit for their contributions in the 1980s, but the state has no particular reason today to promote their old films. Anyone who is 24 years old today, was born in 1990. The 1980s seem a bit like ancient history. Even though there’s a connection between the problems of the Mao-era, the problems of the 1980s, and the problems of today, the college age students from China whom I have taught in China and in the United States know surprisingly little about PRC history. They are well aware of the problems that haunt China today, but are less aware of the details of the connections between those problems and the problems of the recent past.

As for Huang Jianxin, I have found his highly forgettable films of the post-1989 period to be far less interesting than his 1980s trilogy. The film scene is much more complex and competitive today, given the advent of highly commercial films and the rise of independent filmmakers. People like Huang, Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Chen Kaige paid their dues and made their brilliant contributions under extremely difficult circumstances. It’s unreasonable to expect them to play the same role indefinitely. Others, especially in the new independent sector, have come forward to play pioneering roles.

CDT: You write about Chinese films making a “caricature of Western values.” Have Chinese films displayed a more nuanced understanding of Western values over time?

PGP: The theme of alleged Western “spiritual pollution” comes up time and again in Chinese filmmaking, despite the fact that all cultures, including Chinese culture, have strong and weak points. It’s part of a politics of scapegoating by leadership elites who want to blame someone else for China’s problems. These caricatures of the culture of the “Western” other are often crude and simplistic. Every time one of the campaigns goes away, one is tempted to say, “OK, we won’t see that again.” But then another campaign is launched. In fact, there is another push of this sort under way in China right now, despite the extent to which Chinese culture has been globalized. This strategy always works on some people, but as increasing numbers of Chinese students and tourists go abroad, scapegoating of this sort has become less and less effective. If Western culture is so spiritually polluted, many in China wonder, why is the daughter of Chinese President Xi Jinping a student at Harvard? Why is there no university in China good enough for her? Why is she attending the most bourgeois-liberal university in the US? Why are thousands upon thousands of Chinese undergraduate students pouring into North American and European universities for their education? Why are so many thousands of prosperous and well-educated Chinese buying real estate like crazy in North America and Europe? Why are so many Chinese trying so hard to gain permanent residence or citizenship status in North America and Europe for themselves or their family members?

Keep in mind, however, that the Communist Party didn’t invent these caricatures of Western culture. Chinese filmmakers have been doing it since the 1920s. It’s sensational and it sells tickets. Producers of popular culture in fast-lane places like Shanghai recognized the undeniable allures of modern culture, but warned people to be cautious lest they get lost. My parents said the same thing to me about beatnik and hippie culture! Leadership elites have a different kind of concern. If citizens embark on cultural explorations, leaders fret, they might be more difficult to control and they might embrace various kinds of “countercultures.”

It is fair to say that in recent times, certainly since the late 1980s and early 1990s, that Chinese filmmakers, especially those who work in the new non-state sector, have been less inclined to take up the controversy about foreign spiritual pollution in explicit ways. Indeed, some of them indirectly challenge stereotypes about the alleged foreign origins of cultural phenomena that are worrisome to state elites. Zhang Yuan’s wonderful 1996 underground film East Palace, West Palace (Dong gong, xi gong) is a good example. It was the PRC’s first film on gay life and it focused on sexuality and the quest for love. It totally rejects the idea that gay culture somehow came to China from overseas. The film couldn’t be screened publicly in China, but it was well received internationally. It seemed very fresh and sane.

CDT: Why did you initially deem the wave of underground and independent productions that came out shortly before and after 2000 “self-indulgent” and “trivial” but later change your mind saying “Chinese artists had earned the right to be self-indulgent” because of decades of “Maoist collectivism and asceticism.” Which films did you find self-indulgent? Were these films self-indulgent because of Western influence?

PGP: I think some of my initial reactions to underground and independent filmmaking in China were shaped by the fact that I’m primarily a student of Chinese history, society, and politics. Whether doing research on the 1930s or the present day, I was always looking for cultural artifacts and especially visual sources that analyze big social problems including class tensions, the urban-rural divide, power hierarchies, corruption, gender relations, injustice, ethnic conflict and so forth. In many ways I’m a product of 1960s American culture. I’ve researched many Chinese films of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s that take on big, sweeping questions of this sort. These films were not produced by the government, they were produced in studios that were independent of the state.

More than ten years ago the UC San Diego library began collecting large numbers of underground and independent films made in China. Soon our collection was the largest in the world. Today it has more than 2,000 titles. We held our first Chinese underground film festival in 2003. When I first began to take a close look at large numbers of these films, documentaries and features alike, I was no doubt hoping for the same sort of independent, critical engagement with broad social issues that we see in the films made before 1949 by independent, non-state sector filmmakers. I was looking for political critiques and at least some finger pointing. I was interested in such issues as environmental degradation, recovering lost histories, child trafficking, corruption, and organized crime. Eventually I found many significant works that treated such topics, films like Peng Tao’s Red Snow (Hongse xue, 2006), Liu Bingjian’s Crying Woman (Kuqi de nuren, 2002), and Ai Xiaoming’s Love and Care (Guan ai zhi jia, 2007). But initially I looked randomly through our collection and was struck by the large numbers of films that seemed very inwardly directed instead of outwardly directed. I was looking for critical protest films but was confronted by very large numbers of films, especially documentaries, that screamed, “Look at me!” They seemed very self-indulgent to me and I quickly tired of their repetitiveness. But of course I soon realized that these films were highly political in their own ways. They were, after all, a very logical response to decades of Maoist collectivism when people were supposed to “merge with the masses” and deny “self.” Once a space suddenly opened up for reflections on self and individual identities, many, many young urbanites took the plunge. They engaged with passion in what I call “identity searches.” I feel lost. Who am I? Gu Tao’s 2007 film Starkers: The Naked Life of Qin Yongjian (Wo de shenti ni zuo zhu) is a good example of this type of sensational, self-exploration film that falls squarely into the counterculture category. Zhang Zhanqing’s documentary For Every Minute I Life, I Plan to Enjoy 60 Seconds (Huole yifen zhong, kui huo liushi miao, 2006) is another great example. It’s both disturbing and revealing.

These “identity search” films are not the result of Western cultural influence. They are a very logical response to the destructive, collectivist excesses of Maoism. Naturally, global context and global exposure is part of the picture. But the main causal dynamics are internal and domestic. The same thing would happen in North Korea if there was a sudden and dramatic ideological shift. With the end of self-imposed isolation, young people in North Korea would be exposed to the global culture of South Korea and this would cause confusion and force many to reflect and think in new ways about “self.” I’m a New Englander, so I’m aware of the extent to which American hippie culture of the 1960s was a conscious departure from collectivist and repressive Puritan culture.

CDT: What was the first Chinese film you ever watched and which film have you watched the most times since?

PGP: Starting in 1966 it was almost impossible to see mainland Chinese films. This is because once the Cultural Revolution began virtually all the films made before and after 1949 were denounced and no longer accessible. I travelled around China in the summer of 1971, half way through the Cultural Revolution, and was able to see a few films, but all of them were filmed versions of Jiang Qing’s model operas and ballets – – not items that originated as movie ideas.

I believe the first time I had a chance to see an old Chinese film was in Hong Kong in 1977 when, by luck, there was a screening of Huang Zuolin’s absolutely delightful and brilliant social comedy Fake Bride, Phony Bridegroom (Jia feng xu huang) made in early 1947 in Shanghai. The screenplay was written by Sang Hu, and the film starred Li Lihua and Shi Hui. In the 1980s I was finally able to meet Huang Zuolin, Sang Hu, and Li Lihua and discuss their early work. The great actor Shi Hui committed suicide during the vicious Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Quite simply, the movie just blew me away. Many of us who studied modern Chinese literature and culture had heard stories about the splendors of early-era Chinese films, but I was unprepared for the extreme pleasure associated with actually seeing one. Set in post-war Shanghai, the film offers a savage critique of life in Civil War China without ever mentioning the awful Civil War that was sweeping the land. It’s about two marginalized young people, an ordinary barber and a single mom, whose survival anxieties cause them to function as crafty con artists. The fun begins when she posts a notice in the paper saying she is a rich young woman just returned from the USA who will consider marriage applications from appropriately rich and handsome young men, and he responds to the ad by claiming that he is a wealthy graduate returning from Oxford. The film is one of those national allegories I mentioned before. The message is that our society is a humongous fake and people are doing what it takes to survive.

No doubt the film I have watched the most times is Wu Yonggang’s 1934 masterpiece The Goddess (Shennu). It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve seen it at least 50 times. It stars the legendary silent-screen actress Ruan Lingyu, a world-class performer. It’s one of those social issue films that functions as a detailed ethnography of a common Shanghai prostitute. The film is powerful precisely because it assaults the moral sensibilities of comfortable middle-class people. In fact it subverts mainstream moral categories. In this film, the “clean” people, including the urban bourgeoisie, businessmen, school teachers and neighborhood moms, are “dirty,” while the “dirty” people, especially street hookers, are “clean,” one might even say angelic — hence the title Goddess. The great films work every time. This film is 80 years old, but it still feels current. I screened this film for my class in Shanghai in 2010 and the local students loved it and were stunned by its contemporary relevance since prostitution is once again a serious problem in China. And once again, many urban middle class people who present themselves as “clean” are at the very least unattractive and in many senses “dirty.” This film is quite accessible now, so your readers should have an easy time finding it.

CDT:What is the most underrated and overrated Chinese film made over the past century? Why?

PGP: This is the most difficult question you’ve asked in part because judgments like these are so subjective and matters of taste. Ask ten specialists and you’ll get ten different answers. The question is also difficult because ever since 1949 there’s been an unrelenting official promotion in China of pre-1949 films that are regarded as canons of the so-called “progressive” or “leftist” tradition of Chinese filmmaking. Never mind that the whole notion of clear “leftist” and “rightist” traditions is artificial and bogus. Once a film ended up on the “progressive” list it got promoted at home and abroad as a “classic” and thus was far more accessible than other titles that were hidden away in the archive. So when I think of “underrated,” I tend to think of works that are not regarded by officialdom as part of that canon and therefore much more difficult to see. A good example from 1928 is Oceans of Passion, Heavy Kissing (Qing hai zhong wen), a silent-era work directed by Xie Yunqing. The first two-thirds of this movie are really terrific. It’s a “Shanghai modern romance” story, but in this particular case the love triangle doesn’t involve a man and two women but a woman and two men, one of whom is her husband! The first part of the tale unfolds in many surprising ways. Modernity is desirable, but very disorienting and confusing for the young protagonists, none of whom are evil people. The film also deals in realistic ways with ongoing pressures to conform to pre-modern patriarchal norms.

Another similarly underrated film is Pan Jienong’s Streets and Alleys (Jietou xiangwei), released in late 1948 when the Civil War was winding down. It’s a highly effective and well-acted comedy that treats the subject of downward social mobility in the post-war era and the need for down-and-out urban folks to organize themselves in something like anarchist mutual aid collectives that have nothing to do with familial or blood ties. Considering that the film was released on the eve of the Communist victory, you would think it qualifies as a “progressive” work. But it was never placed into the canonical category. This is because it was made by a director who was a member of the Nationalist Party and it was produced in a Nationalist state-owned film studio. In short, the film was highly compelling and politically engaged but it contradicted a politically-correct narrative that insisted that any film connected to the Nationalists had to be a “rightist” work.

As I said earlier, Zhang Yimou certainly paid his dues and made immense contributions in the 1980s and 1990s. But if I think about grossly overrated works, two of his later works, Hero (Yingxiong, 2002) and House of the Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu, 2004), come immediately to mind. I could never figure out what these films contributed. But, of course, even these works tell us a lot about the frantic commercialization of state-sponsored Chinese filmmaking after 2000. Thinking about these overrated films, I feel like I want to put Jiang Wen’s superb independent film Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile, 2000) near the top of the list of seriously underrated movies.

CDT: What’s next for you?

PGP: We held a wonderful workshop at UC San Diego last June on new independent documentary films. We invited Wu Wenguang, perhaps the most influential independent documentary filmmaker in China, to visit us for eight days of intense viewing and discussion. He brought 24 films with him. We devoted most of our time to a couple of major multi-year projects unfolding at his Caochangdi Work Station in Beijing. One is “The Memory Project” and the other is “The Village Project.” Most independent filmmakers are solo acts, but Wu is quite different in the sense that he actively recruits young amateurs to come to Caochangdi to get basic training and then he turns them loose to go back to their home villages throughout China to make films about both the past and the present. Our goal is to produce a book that explores in considerable detail all the exciting things going on in the independent documentary sector in China today.

The studio even spent about $10 million to convert “Noah” into 3-D, making it more appealing to potentially lucrative territories such as China, Russia, Brazil and Germany.

But “Noah” and his ark won’t be landing in China any time soon. The country’s cinematic censors have refused to give the Russell Crowe movie one of the nation’s limited non-Chinese release slots, two people with knowledge of the studio’s efforts to bring the movie to the mainland said Thursday.

[…] As recently as Tuesday, Paramount believed that the film had been accepted for release in China, according to a person familiar with the process. Director Darren Aronofsky was scheduled to visit the country to promote the film, but now he will travel next week only to Japan, where “Noah” opens June 13.
Another person with knowledge of China’s censorship system said “Noah” may have been shunned partially out of commercial concerns. [Source]

“This was for religious reasons, though it seems the whole issue was quite complicated,” the source told The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie was due to screen mid-May and was being imported on a flat-fee basis, which means that it did not come under the quota of 34 overseas movies allowed into China on a revenue-share basis.

However, even flat-fee movies have to get censorship approval and this was not to be. Religion is a sensitive issue in defiantly secular China, and the biblical tale was always going to be closely scrutinized. A number of Muslim countries such as Indonesia have already banned the movie.

[…] There are also possibly commercial reasons why Noah was not allowed. Hollywood has been having a strong run in the past few weeks in China, with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 taking a record $10 million on its opening day despite an unofficial blackout to help boost local movies; and Captain America: The Winter Soldier has taken nearly $116 million in China to date. [Source]

“You talk about co-production in China, but you don’t want to face the history of China,” Mr. Stone said, adding that he had tried to coproduce films about Mao and the Cultural Revolution with Chinese companies since he first visited in the 1990s but had repeatedly “run into a wall.”

“It is about time,” said the three-time Academy Award winner. “You should open up your past the way the United States opened its past.”

Mr. Ning, who was on the judging panel at the festival, said Mr. Stone was just trying to “finding fault” with the Chinese film industry.

“If we want to go to America to shoot ‘9/11’, I expect they would say no as well,” Mr. Ning said in an interview during the festival with the state-run Global Times that was posted online on Tuesday.

“You cannot judge from a ‘finding-fault’ perspective on topics that are sensitive,” he said. “China’s issues aren’t that simple.” [Source]

Japan’s leaders have expressed “deep remorse” over the physical damage and psychological pain the country has inflicted on other Asian countries, but repeated visits by cabinet ministers to a controversial war shrine in Tokyo and growing talk of revising the nation’s peace constitution have made other countries skeptical about the intention of these remarks.

He said that if Japan came out with a more forthright apology “that would make front-page headlines everywhere in the world.”

[…] Mr. Stone described Japan’s face-off with China over disputed territories in the East China Sea as like “some kid who goes out there and picks fights and then has got his big brother behind him to go clean up after him,” referring to the United States’ security obligations to Japan. [Source]

“The whole jury agreed to leave the award vacant, and this is a unique action from the Directors’ Guild,” said the celebrated director of Aftershock and Back to 1942, who is often referred to as “China’s Spielberg.”

A notable absence from the films in competition was Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, which had been nominated but was withdrawn at the last minute as it failed to pass censorship in time.

While there were no explicit references during the ceremony, the decision not to award the best director and best film honors is being interpreted by some insiders as a form of protest against the government’s decision not allow the movie to screen in general release in China. Jia’s critically celebrated film touches on many politically sensitive themes including corruption, economic inequality, prostitution and growing violence in China. It won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival last May.

In an interview with Sina.com before the event, guild president Li Shaohong explained that since A Touch of Sin has neither reached theaters nor been officially released on DVD, it was disallowed from competing for the awards. [Source]

The fact that Mr. Jia’s film was not cleared by the government for release in theaters or in DVD form in China in 2013 disqualified it from consideration for an award. But several directors contacted about the film said the decision not to award the two main prizes was not a protest against its nonrelease.

“This year’s selection wasn’t aimed at censorship, just at the Chinese film environment,” Mr. Wang said. “We were just purely talking about films, about returning to origins, everything else was thrown out.”

[…] Ms. Li, the guild chairwoman, also said there was no connection between the decision and the fact that Mr. Jia’s film has not been allowed to be shown in China. But, she said by telephone, “It is a great pity that the film could not get permission to be shown. If a film doesn’t get approval, if it didn’t show in 2013, then there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” [Source]

Domestic films soon will be censored by regulators in the province where film production companies are based, rather than by a national one, extending nationwide a program that had been in place in five provinces since 2010.

[…] Although the move loosens the central grip on censorship, insiders are skeptical it will do much to open up the industry.

Xie Fei, a prominent director and a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, called the move “a new bottle with old wine” on his verified Sina Weibo account.

Mr. Xie said film regulators “censor many local films that will never make it to screens to be seen by audiences” while “turning a blind eye to the absence of ratings on foreign films posted online as well as the messy situation of intellectual rights protection online.”

[…] “Adjusting the censorship process cannot solve the problem as long as the censorship standard remains the same,” said Zhou Jianwei, a council member of the Shanghai Film Critics Society. “Only abolishing the censorship system and setting up a rating system can really solve the problem.” [Source]

The new system will come into effect in July and is aimed at bringing Chinese ratings data in line with international standards and dealing with repeated complaints that viewership data in China is manipulated.

The Standardization Administration of China said in a statement that Chinese TV ratings should be consistent with international general standards and that the methods of surveying and the technology use should keep pace with the global norm.

“At the same time, the ratings system will have to match the specific situation in the Chinese TV ratings market, ensuring the smooth implementation of TV ratings surveys,” the statement said.

[…] To ensure the objectivity and fairness of the information gathered, data providers must strictly keep the information of sample households secret and prevent the same household from being influenced by a third party. Data users should also comply with professional ethics; they cannot compete with others in the same industry in an improper way and cannot access the information or interfere with the viewing behavior of sample households. [Source]

“In theory, it will definitely show. In reality? I talk to [film regulators] basically once every two weeks,” Mr. Jia told China Real Time in a recent interview. He said the film had been basically approved by censors months ago but was still awaiting a final OK. “The official side is a little anxious. [They think] maybe the audience won’t be able to take it. Maybe there will be negative reactions.”

[…] “A Touch of Sin” tells the stories of four people—a villager locked in struggle with corrupt officials and businessmen; a migrant who returns home and ends up hunting the local wealthy; a sauna receptionist who is assaulted by a client; and an unhappy factory worker—all of whom crack under the pressure of injustice and indifference. It’s unusually blunt fare for a Chinese film based largely on real-life stories that spread on Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging platform that has come to serve as both a virtual town square and an alternative, less tightly managed news source.

[…] The director dismissed as “naïve” the argument, often put forth by censors, that Chinese people need to be protected from reality online and in the cinema because it might lead to social disorder. “Life can’t be full of happiness. Culture ought to have a certain load-bearing capacity,” he said [Source]

An early version of Chinese director Jia Zhangke‘s critically acclaimed film A Touch of Sin turned up on top piracy sites over the weekend. On torrent providers such as The Pirate Bay, the illegal copy has already logged thousands of downloads.

[…] So far, the pirated copy of the film, which doesn’t include subtitles, presents viewers — whether Chinese or international — with some considerable linguistic barriers. The movie’s multiple narratives take place in four far-flung regions of China, from the booming southern megalopolis of Guangzhou to the northern mountainous province of Shanxi. To fully comprehend the film, a viewer would need to understand four Chinese dialects.

Jia says he and his backers at Shanghai Film Studio are pushing on with their campaign to sway the censors.

“I have been working hard to get the movie in theaters. It is something worth doing, and I won’t stop trying,” he posted to his Sina Weibo account. [Source]

The four story lines that make up Jia Zhangke’s “A Touch of Sin” were inspired by Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. During 2011 and 2012, when Jia was making the film, a string of apparently senseless killings—including several kindergarten rampages—dominated headlines and sparked anguished soul-searching among the horrified public. (For a time, the country’s most popular viral video showed a two-year-old hit-and-run victim bleeding on the roadside, ignored by eighteen people who passed by.) As Christopher Beam argued in a piece that drew a link between Jia’s film and China’s sobering drumbeat of violence: “In a country with no ‘good Samaritan’ laws and a history of victims suing their helpers, [those who walk past without lending a hand] were acting rationally, albeit monstrously.”

It is a chilling thing to be both rational and monstrous: we tend to believe, rightly or wrongly, that inexplicable evil does not involve logic. But it’s hard to determine whether any of these calculations apply to the premeditated attack in Kunming, which quickly came to be known as “China’s 9/11.” Almost immediately after the attack, authorities identified the perpetrators as Uighur separatists from Xinjiang, in the country’s restive northwest. (Reports claimed that police on the scene had recovered a black flag traditionally associated with those who support independence for what some Uighurs call East Turkestan.)

[…] In the past year alone, there have been more than two hundred incidents of violence in Xinjiang. The most high-profile attack, however, took place in Beijing last October, when a jeep deliberately plowed into pedestrians in Tiananmen Square and caught fire, killing the three Uighurs inside, and two pedestrians, while injuring more than forty others. [Source]

A Touch of Sin has thus far been denied an official release permit in China despite Jia and the Shanghai Film Studio behind him having worked closely with official censors from the get-go. If history is any guide, the denial is tantamount to a ban. Without a release in China, A Touch of Sin could not be submitted even for the Best Foreign Language Film prize. By censoring Chinese films to uphold the ruling Communist party’s view of an appropriate cinematic portrayal of China, film authorities limit the country’s chances of winning an Oscar.

This year, China’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film category was populist director Feng Xiaogang’s famine epic Back to 1942, and it failed to get nominated by members of the Academy. […]

With so few officially-approved films to choose from and submit for nomination it stands to reason that even fewer filmmakers from China have ever won any Oscar, let alone an Oscar in a major category. In fact, only one Chinese national ever has. Composer Tan Dun, from Changsha, Hunan, in central China, won the Oscar for Best Original Score for his music in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the 2000 Best Foreign Language film by Taiwan-born American director Ang Lee. By comparison, 15 films from Japan have been nominated and four have won the top honor awarded by the Academy, since 1947, for films with a predominantly non-English dialogue. [Source]